William Buckland: the man who tried to eat every animal | 91TV
Transcript
- It is the 1830s and you're invited to dinner at the home of
- one of Britain's most celebrated scientists.
- You take the only chair
- that isn't piled high with books, rocks and fossils.
- Raucous children are eager to show you their pets.
- The air is a dusty cocktail of smells.
- But at last dinner arrives.
- Is it roast turkey, mutton, ham?
- No, it's mouse on toast.
- Your host is William Buckland, and he's a zoophage,
- someone with a passion for eating one of every animal on Earth.
- Mouse is just the starter.
- Buckland was born in 1784
- and became the first person ever to take geology -
- the study of the origin, history, and structure of the Earth -
- at the University of Oxford.
- He was then ordained as a priest,
- before becoming a Reader in mineralogy,
- giving popular, if unorthodox lectures.
- A student recalled him sweeping down the front row one morning,
- holding a hyena skull.
- He picked out an undergraduate and demanded,
- "What rules the world?"
- "Haven't an idea," the student replied.
- "The stomach, sir!" bellowed Buckland,
- "The stomach rules the world!"
- And Buckland lived by this rule.
- Dinner at the Buckland house could consist of hedgehog,
- crocodile, panther, sea slug,
- porpoise, mole and even earwig.
- And life was no less extraordinary between meals.
- William and his wife Mary taught their children natural history
- in a house packed to the rafters with specimens -
- animal, vegetable and mineral...
- living and dead.
- When they weren't riding ponies through the dining room,
- or playing with snakes and frogs,
- the children took part in their parents' scientific studies.
- One particularly whacky experiment involved spreading pie pastry
- over the kitchen table and allowing a pet tortoise to walk across it.
- The family then compared the tracks to fossilised tortoise prints
- found in ancient sandstone.
- The tracks were identical.
- Besides eating, fossils were the Bucklands' passion.
- As a religious man, William believed that
- the Great Flood mentioned in Genesis was not just a story,
- but historical fact, and he spent a long time trying to reconcile
- the Bible's account with geological evidence.
- However, after examining the remains of exotic creatures -
- including hyenas - found in a cave in North Yorkshire,
- he started to question the Bible's timeline.
- These animals had not - as some argued passionately -
- been washed there from their tropical homes by Noah's flood,
- they had actually lived there!
- And the passage of geological time had since turned the British Isles
- from a tropical to a temperate landscape.
- William proved this by identifying
- large amounts of hyena dung on the cave floor.
- And time helped explain another mystery of the era - dinosaurs.
- In 1824, Buckland announced arguably his greatest breakthrough of all -
- fossil bones of a giant reptile he named "Megalosaurus",
- found in a slate quarry in Oxfordshire.
- It was the first scientific account of a dinosaur.
- He showed them to French anatomist Georges Cuvier,
- who noted the bones' similarity with living lizards.
- Buckland, Cuvier and others' work was vital
- in helping Victorian Britain understand dinosaurs
- and their place in evolution.
- William's wife Mary was a keen geologist
- and a collector in her own right.
- She illustrated those game-changing hyena bones for the Royal Society
- and produced beautiful teaching aids for William's lectures.
- Like many wives of scientists in the 19th Century,
- she may have done much more than that,
- perhaps contributing to some of William's major works.
- As for William's quest to eat the world's animals...
- well, he failed to complete the challenge,
- despite his best efforts.
- After a period of illness unrelated to his diet,
- he died in 1856.
- Eccentric as they were, the Bucklands remind us
- that science can happen anywhere - including at home -
- and that great science can also be great fun.
- As long as you're not a mouse.
William Buckland was a palaeontologist who is responsible for scientifically describing the first ever dinosaur discovery. He was also a zoophage, someone with a passion for eating every animal on Earth.
Find out more about William Buckland's eating habits:
And about William and Mary Buckland's life:
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